A Passion For `Angels'

Civic Theatre Actors Are Eager To Return To The Stage And Unleash The Second Part Of Tony Kushner's Comic Drama.

January 30, 2000|By Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic

Call it a cliffhanger.

It's the most dramatic kind of cliffhanger - the kind Agatha Christie or even Stephen King would never have dreamed up.

An angel has just crashed through someone's bedroom ceiling.

That was the situation in October 1998 when Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches had its final performance on the Civic Theatre of Central Florida stage.

Sixteen months later, you're still wondering what comes next. And the cast of playwright Tony Kushner's fantastical comic drama - seven out of eight of them the same actors from the first go-round - are poised to pick up where they left off.

In Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, a remarkable cast of characters will start to put back together what Millennium Approaches tore apart.

The experience, says actor Mark Edward Smith, has made him realize just how well-written Angels in America really is.

``We're coming back to it almost as if the time had not passed,'' Smith says. ``The characters have such a life of their own.''

Smith plays Prior Walter, the gay scion of an old WASP family, who learned in the first part of Angels in America that he has come down with AIDS. His anguished lover has left him, he's hearing thumping noises and suffering drenching sweats, and he's waking in the night with extraordinary visions. When an angel breaks through his bedroom ceiling and greets Prior as a prophet, it seems as if absolutely everything has gone wrong.

But that's not counting on the phantasmagorical imagination of Kushner, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the first part of this two-play epic and had plenty more surprises in store. Millennium Approaches and Perestroika are two entirely separate plays, each of them capable of being enjoyed and understood on its own. Yet the cast and director of the Civic's productions have spent the last 16 months in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for the rest of the story to unfold.

``I tried not to think about it too much for fear I would jinx it,'' says Peg O'Keef, whose multiple roles in the two plays include the stern Mormon mother figure Hannah Pitt. ``But I thought about it all the time.''

Smith says he wasn't thinking about Angels all the time, but it was floating through his subconscious. ``It was sort of brewing and percolating under the surface.''

For the actors, returning to the same cast of characters and knowing just about everyone in sight is a particularly happy experience. Leneil Bottoms plays the angel and a nurse called Emily, who serves as sort of a living angel to Prior in his need.

``It's wonderful to be back with the same actors,'' she says. ``It gives me the kind of confidence I wouldn't have otherwise.''

``It was a homecoming,'' says O'Keef, ``like going back 20 years later to your old high school. It becomes almost like a muscle memory - being on the same stage and, with one exception, being surrounded by the same people. It's a very friendly place.''

Yet Perestroika is also something different, and it has been director Lester Malizia's job to guide the actors into new territory. Malizia also directed the first part of Angels in America at the Civic, and he says he has been living with the two plays now for four or five years. Once he got into rehearsals for Perestroika, he realized very quickly that something was different.

``All my expectations had to be thrown out the window,'' he says. ``We're picking up where we left off, so the stakes are much higher.

``The actors have lived with these people already and inhabited them. Now it's a question of taking them much further. This play takes them through their changes. The first play is really the setup. This play is even more close to the bone.''

In Perestroika, a very reluctant Prior takes up the task the angel has given him. And, in the loneliness of his illness, he finds a new community - with Belize, an ex-drag queen nurse who is his best friend; with Emily; and with Hannah Pitt and with her troubled daughter-in-law Harper, an agoraphobic and Valium addict who meets Prior in their shared hallucinations.

Circling around these characters are others who are as integral to the plot - Prior's ex-lover, the guilt-ridden Louis Ironson; Harper's estranged husband, the equally guilt-ridden conservative lawyer Joe Pitt; and Joe's mentor, the outrageously profane, disbarred and dying attorney Roy Cohn.

``When we were working on Millennium, we all agreed that it was very much about destruction and these people's lives being torn apart,'' Smith says. ``There was no redemption or benediction. There's no salvation there at all.

``Perestroika starts at that point, in the rubble and the destruction, and it's a rebuilding process. It's much more building and searching rather than running and hiding.''

Clearly Perestroika is a dramatic journey. But it's a comical one as well. Kushner's characters are recognizable in their extravagance, and the situations they find themselves in are sometimes otherworldly, sometimes hilariously real.